Trying to set up my budget.

I am starting work next week and now that there will two incomes in the household I have decided to start creating a budget. We were basically living paycheck to paycheck before. Now that our household income is doubling I would like to allocate our money a little more wisely.

DH take home is $3,200 w/o OT (depending on job, he works construction). I am approximating that I will be taking home $3,300. I used a calculator to help me figure out withholdings as well as deducting for my 401K and dental plan. So that's $6500 a month.

We have no debt and don't have a car.

Rent (gas/electric inc.): $998

Cable: $170 (calling them today to see if bill can be lowered)

Phone: $150 (also going to change my plan and get a phone that doesn't need a data plan)

Daycare: $2164

Union Dues: $35

BlockBuster: $18.50

Renters Insurance: $56

This totals to $3591.50 giving me a remainder of $2908.50. Now here is where I am stuck. The above are fixed cost aside from phone and cable being up or down a few dollars. I do not know how to split the remainder in to categories such as groceries, transportation (taxi/metro card), spending, retirement, EF, college for DD, sinking fund, and discretionary spending. Do I just give each one a percentage of the remainder or do I give them a fixed amount as well. And I can kinda figure out groceries to about $450 a month and transportation to about $175 but I have no clue about the others. Also, are there any categories that I am missing?

The last time we overhauled our budget, we saved all receipts for a couple of months to see what we were really spending -- and I'm glad we did, because we were waaaay off, esp for groceries & household spending. Maybe try that to get an idea of where your money is going.

We did the same as Julie. We tracked every cent we spent for a full month. Then we used those numbers to set up our budget. We could see what we were spending in each category and where we needed to cut back (eating out) to save some money. After that, our budget has been a work in progress from month to month. It is always going to require some tweaking depending on how things are working for you and if you have things coming up...vacation, birthdays, oil change, whatever else you need to budget for.